CC Licenses make it possible to share content legally and openly. Over the past 20 years, they have unlocked approximately 3 billion articles, books, research, artwork, and music. They’re a global standard and power open sharing on popular platforms like Wikipedia, Flickr, YouTube, Medium, Vimeo, and Khan Academy.

CC’s Legal Tools are a free and reliable public good. Yet most people are unaware that their infrastructure and stewardship takes a lot of money and work to maintain. 

We need to secure immediate and long term funding for the CC licenses and CC0 public domain tool, which are key to building a healthy commons. We’re facing many challenges and threats to the commons–libraries are under attack, misinformation is rampant, and climate change threatens us all. CC is one of the few nonprofit, mission-driven organizations fighting to ensure we have a sound legal infrastructure backing open ecosystems, so that culture and knowledge are shared in order to foster understanding and find equitable solutions to our world’s most pressing challenges.

We need support from like-minded funders to champion sharing practices and tools that oppose the enclosure of the commons.

That’s why we’re launching the Open Infrastructure Circle (OIC) — an initiative to obtain annual or multi-year support from foundations, corporations, and individuals for Creative Commons’ core operations and license infrastructure.

With consistent funding, we can resolve “technical debts” (years of work we’ve had to put on hold due to underfunding!) and make the CC Licenses more user-friendly and accessible to our large, global community. The world has changed a lot since the CC Licenses were first created in 2002, and we want to ensure they stay relevant and easy to use going forward.

We are grateful to our early Open Infrastructure Circle supporters, including the William + Flora Hewlett Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Paul and Iris Brest.

Sign up to join OIC with a recurring gift! Or reach out to us for more information about OIC at development@creativecommons.org.

Thank you for considering joining the Open Infrastructure Circle and contributing to the legal infrastructure of the open web.

The post Announcing CC’s Open Infrastructure Circle appeared first on Creative Commons.

As part of our #20CC anniversary, last year we joined forces with Fine Acts to spark a global dialogue on what better sharing looks like in action. Our #BetterSharing collection of illustrations was the result — we gathered insights from 12 prominent open advocates around the world and tasked 12 renowned artists who embrace openness with transforming these perspectives into captivating visual pieces available under a CC license.

Each month throughout 2023, we will be spotlighting a different CC-licensed illustration from the collection on our social media headers and the CC blog. For November, we’re excited to showcase “Shared Knowledge, Shared Future” by Colombian illustrator, Luisa Brando. The piece, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, was inspired by a quote from Molly Van Houweling, former chair of CC’s Board of Directors:

“Better sharing for a brighter future means that the world is wrapped in a living connective tissue of shared knowledge, culture, and insights that spread joy and alleviate suffering.”

Meet the artist:

Luisa Brando is dedicated to producing visual art and architecture projects sensitive to heritage conservation and dichotomies between nature and culture, tradition and development. Brando currently teaches at Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá), coordinates a Master Plan in Ibague, and continues her artistic work on the geopolitics, images and imaginations of water and other living beings.

Follow Luisa on Instagram: @luisa_brando_art

The post CC’s #BetterSharing Collection | November: Shared Knowledge, Shared Future appeared first on Creative Commons.

 

Maarten believes that “Open GLAM is a necessity of a disbalanced copyright framework.” Maarten talks about how open access policies help institutions achieve their public missions. Open access policies in instutions provides good evidence that society and communities need access to cultural heritage to flourish.

Open Culture VOICES is a series of short videos that highlight the benefits and barriers of open culture as well as inspiration and advice on the subject of opening up cultural heritage. Maarten is an independent consultant and intellectual property lawyer who works with GLAM institutions on open access policies and implementing open information management systems.

Maarten responds to the following questions:

1. What are the main benefits of open GLAM?
2. What are the barriers?
3. Could you share something someone else told you that opened up your eyes and mind about open GLAM?
4. Do you have a personal message to those hesitating to open up collections?

Closed captions are available for this video, you can turn them on by clicking the CC icon at the bottom of the video. A red line will appear under the icon when closed captions have been enabled. Closed captions may be affected by Internet connectivity — if you experience a lag, we recommend watching the videos directly on YouTube.

Want to hear more insights from Open Culture experts from around the world? Watch more episodes of Open Culture VOICES here >>

The post Maarten Zeinstra — Open Culture VOICES, Season 2 Episode 31 appeared first on Creative Commons.

Visitors to the CC  home webpage recently were welcomed by a big black box and the message “Sorry: This video does not exist.” In the spot where CC was showcasing a custom video made last year for CC’s 20th anniversary, there was now a stark error message, making it look like the CC website was broken.

After some investigation, CC learned that the copy of the video we had hosted on the Vimeo platform had been tagged with an automated copyright violation takedown notice. Anyone who has had this experience knows that typically a service will stop delivering content that automated processes have identified as violating copyright, and then it’s up to you as the account holder to prove you have rights to share the work, or modify it so it no longer triggers automated filters. Meanwhile, your content is missing and your website may look broken.

Almost a week later, Vimeo approved CC’s detailed appeal of the takedown and the video was back on our home webpage. It’s not always easy to figure out how to file an appeal for a takedown like this — in fact Vimeo’s appeal button led to a dead link, so it actually took us at CC extra time to even figure out how to file an appeal with Vimeo.

Robot justice may be blind, but there was plenty of irony in this takedown notice, delivered to an organization like CC that knows a bit about people’s freedom to share. Irony on top of irony: the specific content flagged for copyright infringement was a sample of a musical track from The Wired CD, perhaps the most famous collection of openly licensed music ever published.

Fortunately, CC had taken great care in the production of the video, carefully tracking attributions for every sound and image. In another dose of irony, there is no good way to display the rather lengthy attributions for this video on Vimeo, and so one must look to a different host — like Flickr — for the video to display the full attribution statement.

The internet may not have missed this specific version of a short video for a few days, but this small example demonstrates the stakes of automated systems that put the interests of big copyright ahead of everyone else’s. Even with the black and white “Sorry,” the message that “this video does not exist” betrays a vision of a world where copyright reigns supreme with little to no space left for uses based on fundamental freedoms, like the freedom of expression. Because the video does indeed still exist, not only on Vimeo, where it was merely locked in private mode, awaiting appeal, but also anywhere else it might live, like on Flickr, the Internet Archive, Wikimedia Commons, YouTube (which also has the video in private mode, pending CC’s appeal), or — if you have the resources — on your own internet hosting infrastructure.

CC was embedding the version of this video hosted on Vimeo on our home webpage because Vimeo embedding has some technical advantages, but one lesson here is never to put all your web hosting eggs in a single basket — if you have the time and resources to share open content in multiple places, your content is less likely to “not exist” due to the whims of any one host.

Another lesson is that good attribution practices are not only important to meet the requirements of open licensing — giving credit to upstream creators and guidance to downstream users — but also as a record of the multiple layers of rights and permissions within your  work, ready for you to use when you get that unexpected copyright takedown notice or legal challenge. Because CC had taken such care with the attributions for this video, we were well-equipped to file a successful appeal with Vimeo.

Why wait for your next takedown notice? Brush up your skills in making good attributions via CC’s online guidance or go deeper with our CC Certificate program >

The post Sorry: This video does not exist. CC’s Open VIdeo Blocked by Automatic Copyright Robots appeared first on Creative Commons.

Marike van Roon shares that “the main benefit of open culture is accessibility” because if you are not fortunate enough to be part of organization that pays for you to have access to collections and you don’t live in city with public collections it’s almost impossible to access a lot of cultural heritage. In this episode we learn about the institutions that support opening up collections in the Netherlands and how detrimental copyright laws and pay walls are to open culture around the world.

Open Culture VOICES is a series of short videos that highlight the benefits and barriers of open culture as well as inspiration and advice on the subject of opening up cultural heritage. Marike van Roon is currently an independent art historian and has been part of the cultural heritage sector in the nNetherlands for more than 30years. She is also a Wikipedian and was a member of the board of Wikimedia Nederland.

Marike responds to the following questions:

1. What are the main benefits of open GLAM?
2. What are the barriers?
3. Could you share something someone else told you that opened up your eyes and mind about open GLAM?
4. Do you have a personal message to those hesitating to open up collections?

Closed captions are available for this video, you can turn them on by clicking the CC icon at the bottom of the video. A red line will appear under the icon when closed captions have been enabled. Closed captions may be affected by Internet connectivity — if you experience a lag, we recommend watching the videos directly on YouTube.

Want to hear more insights from Open Culture experts from around the world? Watch more episodes of Open Culture VOICES here >>

The post Marike van Roon — Open Culture VOICES, Season 2 Episode 30 appeared first on Creative Commons.